QI Christmas quiz: Test your ignorance

The QI elves are an intelligent race, tasked with finding interesting facts and questions for the hit BBC 2 panel show. As well as helping to make the QI television show, they make a BBC Radio 4 series, The Museum of Curiosity; a hit podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish; and a string of fact- packed books. This year's Christmas offerings are 1,234 QI Facts to Leave You Speechless and QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance.

QI is perhaps best-known for its General Ignorance round, during which a klaxon goes off if contestants say something commonly believed to be true that is actually wrong. The idiots.

Here are 20 elf-approved quiz questions, many of which have an arty slant. Some are straightforward; others are General Ignorance traps. There are 2 points for a correct answer but minus 10 for each klaxon. Hold on to your Christmas hats; here we go. And to any HR managers despairing that their office is doing no work after finding this quiz, we say: humbug.

1 Which band released I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day?

2 Which holiday is celebrated on December 26th every year?

3 What colour is a robin's breast?

4 From left to right, what colour are the three vertical stripes on the Belgian flag?

5 Who painted the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

6 True or false: Mozart kept a diary of every dream he ever had.

7 How long does it take to play the Minute Waltz?

8 Which British singer holds the record for the fastest-selling album in the US?

9 When was the name Wendy first used?

10 Dumbledore is an early modern English word for which creature?

11 What were the names of Odysseus's wife and son?

12 The sirens were half-woman, half- what?

13 Where was Juliet standing when she was wooed by Romeo?

14 In December 2015, which novel was named the best British novel of all time by BBC Culture?

15 Who wrote about "lashings of ginger beer"?

16 Who wrote "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times"?

17 Who coined the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson"?

18 What kind of logical reasoning does Sherlock Holmes use?

19 True or false: Charlotte Brontë was the first person to use the term "Wild West".

20 Aside from Rudolph, what are the names ofthe eight reindeer that traditionally pull Santa's sleigh? (one point for each)

• 1,234 QI Facts To Leave You Speechless and The Third QI Book of General Ignorance are available now

(Scroll down for answers)

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How did you do?  

ANSWERS

1 Wizzard.

2 Klaxon: Boxing Day. Answer: St Stephen's Day. The British holiday of Boxing Day is defined as "the first working day after Christmas", so it's not always on December 26th. For example, if Christmas Day falls on a Friday, Boxing Day is on Monday 28th, because the Saturday and Sunday aren't working days. But there is a holiday that always takes place on December 26th: the Feast of St Stephen. Appropriately for someone whose feast day comes the day after Christmas, St Stephen is the patron saint of headaches. He also looks after deacons, horses and coffin makers.

3 Klaxon: red. Answer: orange. Robins got the name "redbreast" in the 1400s. It was the best anyone could do, because the English language had no word for orange. The word "orange" (meaning the fruit) entered English about 1400 – but it wasn't used as the name of a colour until the 1540s. Until then what we see as orange was called red.

4 Black, yellow, red.

5 Michelangelo.

6 False, but he did keep a fart diary.

7 Klaxon: one minute. Answer: About a minute and a half. Chopin never called his whimsical work the Minute Waltz. He called it The Little Dog Waltz, claiming the inspiration for the tune came from watching a small dog chasing its tail. The tune's modern nickname was invented by Chopin's publishers – but they didn't intend it to refer to how long it takes to play. "Minute" also means very small (think my-newt, not minnit) and simply refers to the fact that the piece is very short.

8 Adele.

9 Klaxon: In Peter Pan. Answer: JM Barrie didn't invent the name Wendy, as is often claimed. It occasionally appears on 19-century censuses both in England and the US. But it wasn't restricted to girls: in 1797 a boy born in Gloucestershire was named Wendy.

10 Bumblebee.

11 Penelope and Telemachus.

12 Klaxon: Fish. Answer: They were half-woman, half-bird. Homer doesn't say what they looked like, but contemporary Greek vases from the late eighth century BC show them as women from the waist up and birds from the waist down.

13 Klaxon: On a balcony. Answer: Not on a balcony. Shakespeare wrote that Juliet appeared at a window. He wouldn't have mentioned a balcony as there weren't any in Elizabethan England. The balcony scene was the brainchild of a playwright called Thomas Otway (1652-85), who rearranged Romeo and Juliet as his own in The History and Fall of Caius Marius. It stole the characters, plot and much of the dialogue from Shakespeare and placed them in an ancient Roman setting. The play fell out of fashion and, by the time it was revived in the 1750s, Otway's balcony scene was so ingrained in everyone's minds that it was added to Shakespeare's original.

14 Middlemarch by George Eliot.

15 Klaxon: Enid Blyton. Answer: It's from the 1982 BBC television show The Comic Strip Presents . . . parody, Five Go Mad in Dorset. Enid Blyton never used the phrase "lashings of ginger beer". However, the Famous Five did have lashings of hard-boiled eggs, lashings of peas and new potatoes, lashings of treacle and, in Five Have a Wonderful Time, they face the alarming prospect of "lashings of poisonous snakes".

16 Charles Dickens.

17 Klaxon: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Answer: PG Wodehouse. In all the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes uses the word "elementary" only once – in The Crooked Man (1894) – and he doesn't address Watson after it. " 'Elementary,' said he. 'It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction'." The words "Elementary, my dear Watson" were first used 21 years later in Psmith, Journalist (1915) by PG Wodehouse, gently mocking Holmes's slightly pompous manner. The phrase appeared again at the very end of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929), the first Holmes movie to be made with sound.

18 Klaxon: Deduction. Answer: Holmes used abduction – not deduction – to crack his cases. Deductive reasoning is when a conclusion is certain, provided the facts are true. For example: all men are mortal, Watson is a man. Deduction: Watson is mortal. Holmes, however, more often used abductive reasoning, which works by drawing the most likely conclusion from the available evidence. In essence, it's an educated guess – although Holmes would have hated this description. In The Sign of the Four he says, "I never guess. It is a shocking habit – destructive to the logical faculty."

19 True.

20 Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. (The last two are sometimes written as Dunder and Blixem but you can have points for either; it is Christmas, after all.)